January 23.
Tuene is is a superstition in Fleet Street, amounting almost to a maxim, that journalists should never anticipate obituaries. To moralize on a man before he is dead, excepting always politicians, is to be hidden to his funeral the next week and so, for all that he has done little to deserve the friendship of Englishmen, we may hesitate to speak of the life-work of M. Henri Rochefort, the breezy, outrageous, truculent, witty, warm-hearted, 179 gasconading Marquis de Rochefo: Lucay. But the announcement that he has lately returned to the Figaro," his first real love in the journalistic world, is too strong a temptation. Six or seven years ago when the " Intransigeant " and its editor were clamouring that France should take up the cause of les amis Boers, (of whom ninety-five per cent of Frenchmen had never heard until the outbreak of war), -and wreak a glorious revenge on perfidious Albion, we might have wished for a pen as vitriolic as M. Rochefort's to satisfy our feelings towards him. But time does not only "sour our temper, thin our tresses." It becomes possible to view M. Rochefort's career as a whole; to realize that " crapulous imbeciles," his favourite phrase, was applied as often to M. Waldeck-Rousseau and the Dreyfusards as to milord Salisbury, sir Chamberlain et Cie; above all to make allowance for that saving grace of humour and drollery which differentiated him from such merely unclean writers and caricaturists as MIN. Dramont and Millevoye, Léandre and Willette. In M. Rochefort's case also time has worked a notable change. His tresses, indeed it has conspicuously failed to thin, and his white mane waves to every gust of passion as exuberantly as ever it did; but the passion is of a different order, and at the age of seventy-eight he lays down the political bludgeon to resume that delightful light comedy pen which he abandoned over forty years ago. Neither long disuse nor age has yet altogether staled his infinite variety.
By his own account it was an accident that M. Rochefort ever became a politician. " On m'a coiffé dun bonnet rouge (universal ensi of buccaneering), jo lo gard wrote in an early number of "La Lanterne," the political pamphlet which he founded on quitting the "Figaro." Considerii at he only parted company with the latter journal because his scathing comments on the Second Empire got him and it into trouble, the p that politics were forced on him as a metier sounds a little hollow. At any rate it is as a politician, or rather a political journalist that we: know him best: and indeed it may be said that M. Rochefort is one of the few French journalists with whom the English public has ever become thoroughly familiar. The period of the Boer War- certainly brought us into acquaintance wi other writers. MIN. Dramont and Millevoye of "La Libre Parole" and " La Patric" respectively have been already mentioned. They may dismissed. The late M. Valfrey,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.